I was in Notre Dame Cathedral a few weeks ago and that proved to be one of the more peculiar settings for a religious experience. I’d happened upon the Cathedral by chance. A metro worker recommended alighting nearby for a decent late afternoon walk to my hotel, and since the Cathedral was right there more or less when I came out of the station…
The lines outside were massive but efficiently managed. The waiting, far less like purgatory than you might imagine.
The restoration of the cathedral, destroyed in a shocking fire in 2019, is not yet wholly complete. And not without controversy. The rush of resources, I mean, money, around a round $1billion, to restore an internationally renowned tourist attraction was compared unsympathetically by some, to the less tenacious resolutions, I mean money, offered for less first world problems than patching a church roof.
Beyond the world famous facade, when I got inside the cathedral, mass was being celebrated and all of the centre pews were occupied by worshippers, hoping to attend I guess a simple mass; while masses (ha!) of people moved, herd-like around the edges in a long one direction loop.
It's a big space, so some of the millers-arounders took their place amongst the parishioners to rest their legs, but then something would catch their eye, this is an eye-catching interior after all, and they would pop up, camera phone in hand, or some even less subtle digital SLR type thing, all zoom-lensed out on a one legged tripod, a monopod, ready to shoot. It seemed a little profane. But ain't that always the way. In that time and place at least, Notre Dame struggled to maintain itself as a holy space and not a marketplace. It felt like it could benefit from a little calm. "Then Jesus entered the temple courts and began to drive out those who were selling there. 'It is written,' he said to them, 'My house will be a house of prayer'; but you have made it 'a den of robbers.' Luke 19:45-46. Trust me, it is written in all four gospels, not just the synoptics, it must have happened. At Notre Dame, damn, all that was lacking was the reverence.
Conversely the gift shop is really relatively poor. Look to Lourdes! Look to Lourdes for Cath. Gifts done supremely well. No one is ever disappointed there. The normally more restrained agnostic, faithless Mrs. Champion - she never ever calls herself that ever, did spring for a disappointing €3 commemorative coin from a vending machine. I lit a candle, shuffled it to the center.
Look, for me, it's no Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, by Rafael Moneo. I am always sucked into Moneo’s hushed space holiness. How did he do that? Well, with around $189.7 million, including the parcel of land, in 1998 dollars when building began. It was consecrated in 2002. It was constructed to replace St. Vibiana’s Cathedral that had been damaged in the 1994 Northridge quake. My own apartment flapped around like a damp cardboard box that night and I nearly lost a new TV set. Lacking rebuilding funds, I did lose my favorite bar in Fullerton. Meanwhile back in downtown LA, the archdiocese was forced onto the defensive over cost. Ain’t that always the way, overpriced civil engineering is always met with complaints about their billing practices. It’s like they, meaning you just don’t understand the word grift. Although I am not saying that here. It’s all the more troubling it seems when it’s God’s money being spent. The usual noises about the poor from The Catholic Worker and better uses for the near $200 million and all this and all that were decisively brushed aside by Cardinal Mahoney reminding us in Jesus’ own words, in an essay published in the Los Angeles Times, that any complainers were “...Out of step with Church history and with the teaching of Jesus, who said that people do not live by bread alone.”
But a holy space is what we got. I once met Cardinal Mahoney at the Starbucks there. No security. My daughter was baptised in the walk-in full immersion font. I took her god mum to the pre-christening instructionals, there's like a hundred godparents there - most of the religious texts referenced, dispensed with, while the deeper discussion was arranged around the Lion King and the Circle of LIfe - it’s Hollywood after all - the hits are all we know.
The Cathedral Mausoleum was said to be amongst the most expensive real estate per foot in all of Los Angeles. I know Gregory Peck is in there. I wonder whether Mark Wahlberg has a reservation? Descending into it, feels like zipping into your one piece for your phenobarbital apple sauce and vodka while you await Marshall Applewhite’s Hale-Bopp comet spaceship. The Cathedral Crypt is the most LA-magnificent and the ultimate of all of God’s waiting rooms.
If Antonio Gaudi, God's Architect, venerated in one of the final acts of Pope Francis, principally for the power of his work on the Basilica of the Sagrada Família which opens hearts to Beauty is on his way to canonization, what thoughts must there be for power of Rafael Moneo's staggeringly considered accomplishment on a very significant continent for the Catholic church?
When I was last in the Los Anegeles cathedral, on an Easter Sunday many years ago now, the anxiety over the scuffle for parking spaces in the underground lot was palpable. Places can be at a premium when one service ends and another is about to begin. Many prayers I guess to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, the unofficial patron saint of parking places. Try it next time you're going to Aldi, see if it works.
